


Make the world go round

by laughingpineapple



Category: Georgia Coffee "Twin Peaks" Commercials, Twin Peaks
Genre: Dreams, Dreamsharing, Gen, Not a resolution but a step forward, Recursive stories and happy ending as an archetype
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-07 15:40:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12844287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Asami and Ken, Dale and Laura, and the deep forces that flow through the universe. Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly or am I a butterfly gulping down a can of Georgia Coffee's rich, incredible brew?





	Make the world go round

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



> [Here's the full collection of the Georgia Coffee ads, all two minutes of them!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3acm7j9k_1w)

“Deep within the forest, long past the beaten path, there was a podium, a large golden podium rising above the grass and the bushes. The steps of the podium were in the shape of a circle that was not made for winners and runner-ups: we were all winners, just for making it there, to that clearing under the pines...”

Ken sipped his morning coffee. His bushy brows furrowed as he tried to picture that place - he wanted to know if there were any birds in the forest, maybe a wagtail or a wren, but he didn't want to interrupt his wife's tale, so he kept that pressing question to himself.

“I was wearing the white dress I wore in the days of our youth... the days when I was so lost, beyond the curtains, and you found me, and I was not lost anymore. I haven't seen it in years. So that's where it was… in the dream.”

She smiled at him, radiant Asami, in her fifties now and still as beautiful as ever. But then again, Ken supposed that he was biased. He smiled back and nodded as a sign of encouragement. They always shared their funny dreams over breakfast, to start things out with a cup of strong roast and a healthy helping of weird, but he could see that this story wasn't cut from the same cloth as last month's riveting tale of the possum travel agency, or even their all-time favorite, the Great Kyoto Rock-Licking Fad of 1997. Today, Asami sounded as if she were still walking through the woods.

“There were many pedestals and three people. Just three. Lucy-san from Twin Peaks was there, sitting on her golden seat, and there was another American woman with us - she wore an eyepatch and carried a golden shovel like the needle of a compass. There was fire inside her, but she sat quietly, we all sat quietly like statues in a shrine.”

She reached for her mug. “At least we had coffee,” she added, mostly to herself.

“On the other end of the clearing, there was…” She looked at him, at a loss for words. When she tried to retrace the steps of that sentence, she trailed off again. “What I'm saying is,” she said, holding her breath. “We were meant to be four, but we were just three. Just three. The fourth one occupied a space, I think, but the space it occupied, it was empty. A shape had been scratched away, six dark gashes that hung in the sky like a claw wound breaking up the air at its seams. Someone used to be there once, surrounded by the red curtains, and when I kept the curtains in the corner of my eye, and did not dare to look at them straight ahead, I saw a shape hovering over that emptiness, merciful Kannon in her white robes gleaming through the velvet. In her compassion, the goddess had not given up on our missing companion and she waited, and waited, and waited. We all did.”

“You were very still this morning.”

“I feel that I am still waiting.”

“Chin up, dear. You were also waiting for me to mail out those Georgia cans, weren't you? And I did it. That's one wait over, right? The rest will sort itself out too…”

“You sent the pack to Officer Hawk?”

“I went to the post office yesterday! Two more cartons than last year and plenty of time for international shipping to deliver it all before Christmas.”

“This is wonderful, Ken! Did you tell Lucy-san?”

“I did! She told me…” Ken reviewed fifteen minutes of chitchat by counting the topics on his fingers before summarising it all to Asami. Lucy-san could be like that. Nothing wrong with it - not the best conversational partner for international calls, but nothing wrong with it. “She told me that it's supposed to be a surprise, but they already sent us their present last week, but if we haven't received it yet it is still a surprise so she could tell me that they sent it.”

“Is it coffee?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I am glad we have kept this connection. It is like the decades haven't passed.”

“So am I. It is good to have friends far away.” With a sheepish smile, he added: “I think  _ my _ dream tonight was my back filing a complaint after hauling all those cartons, but I'll live…”

“Oh?”

“It was very simple, you see. I was alone on a snowy mountain slope, at night, but there were lights from a distant town brightening up the sky. The whole dream was me assembling a vending machine on a flat stone I had cleared out from the snow... tinker tinker tinker until it was done.”

“All night?”

“All night. Then I filled it with cans of Georgia coffee, of all the varieties we bought for our friends, and then I woke up. Boring, isn't it!”

“You poor thing! I'll get you a hot water bottle for that sore back…”

“Thank you, dear.”

“But first, let's finish our coffee.”

  
  
  


_ Elsewhere _

Darkness hung outside the window, a dense, heavy thing that seemed to seep past the motel’s cheap curtains and eat up what little light they had collected inside. Could be early morning, a long way before the dawn, could be they slept through a whole day and the scarce winter sun was already gone. Laura sure as fuck wasn't moving a single muscle to get off the bed and check. She could hear Dale pacing in the bathroom, going through the motions, clean shaven, impeccable gelled-back hair, a tidy tie knot, which, all in all, was just as transparent a coping method as Laura's own stern refusal to leave the bed. At least she acknowledged they weren't going anywhere fast. Or slow. Or ever. Night road followed dusty road followed foggy road followed boring road through places they did not recognize, lives that weren't theirs. It soon faded into a blur that might as well have been just that empty motel room, forever, an island in a dark sea as the world they used to know drifted ever further away. Dale was the one who insisted on going back on the road every time. One day he would crack properly too, and then what.

“I had a dream, earlier,” she called out.

“Laura, I am glad you made it back safe,” came the swift answer from the bathroom.

“Sure.”

“You doubt my sincerity?”

“I doubt your tastes: where do we sign to drop dead and wake up some other place? Anywhere but the beginning of this here dream. Been there, done that.”

“Well, know that if you left I would miss you. Do you want to share it? What was so bad about the beginning?”

“No, I just like to say shit and then not follow up. So, I was a Japanese woman stuck in the Black Lodge, and...”

This bare mention made him perk out of the bathroom, his hair still falling on his face. “What about a Japanese woman stuck in the Black Lodge? What was she like?”

“Chill, man, what nerve did I hit? I don't know. Young, beautiful, the whole nine yards.”

Dale navigated a small pile of clothes, gently pushing aside three pairs of jeans, a belt and a bra, to sit at the bottom of her bed and listen to her story. That glimpse of recognition was gone, whatever his deal was with Japanese women in metaphysical spaces had been nipped in the bud by her words. Yet he sat down and listened, not like someone who thinks they're gonna gain something from a conversation and not like someone who thinks they're gonna teach you something either. Just like someone who wants to listen to what you have to say, which might just have been the first nice thought to cross Laura's brain since she woke up. She couldn't tell whether it was all genuine on Cooper's part, or half massive guilt trip for getting them stranded in the first place, but hey, she'd take the kindness. Small blessings and all that.

So she told him about her journey in the dream, her white dress, how she'd been lost beyond the curtains, but the ties of love allowed her to be found, which felt nice, really, and then she was not lost anymore. And then they all cracked open some canned coffee to celebrate, and then the dream ended and she blacked out again.

“That’s the funny thing with causation. You can trust it, until you can't.”

“You were there too, Dale, I wouldn't rule out coffee first and Lodge incursions later, but that's how I remember my dream, the coffee came after… or - wait, are you saying the coffee  _ caused _ the rest?”

Laura took a deep breath and sat up, cross-legged on her pillow like a teenager at a slumber party. The light coming from the bathroom's open door cut through the penumbra and painted the bed with long shadows that weren't kind to the wrinkles on Cooper's face. She tried to read his expression, a glimpse in his eyes - not that she'd trust half the crap he spouted, but the possibility of a lecture on cause and effect being a little wonky was more alluring than staying in bed for the foreseeable future, and her interest was piqued.

Too bad the lecture she expected was not what he had latched onto. “I was there?” he asked, in his dream voice as soft as a fucking marshmallow.

She frowned. They were in each other's dreams an awful lot of the time, no big deal. Besides, the way she remembered it - and the details were already starting to slip away - it was like a small party in the woods at the end of her dream. A few deputies were there. So was Margaret Lanterman for that matter. The Black Lodge: bringing the whole community together.

“There? Yeah, you were there.”

“I do not remember this. I remember the canned coffee, but not…”

“Told you, it was a dream.”

“We don't remember many things.”

“Hey, Dale.”

“What?”

“Let's get outta this dump.”

 

“Something's changed,” Laura whispered to him as they checked out, dramatically conspiratorial in a corner of the empty, dimly lit hall.

“I think so.” The sky was still dark outside and the walls and furniture around them had the substance of cold, wintry dreams. It was hard to be sure of anything, in those days, but they didn't look like the same building they'd walked into. “That does not mean I am going to indulge your betting habit on the model of the car we are going to find outside.”

“Quitter's talk, grandpa. What do you know, it might be an old junker like the ones they made when you were around.”

“You're driving.”

 

They walked out of the hall and into a cold night air, inches of snow on the ground and a crisp promise of more. The inn rested on the side of a narrow road that coasted the mountain slope until it reached a pass on the horizon, and then who knows. The distant haze couldn't hide the lights of a faraway town.

Their car was there, the only occupant of the small, snow-covered parking lot. A black and unremarkable sedan, the only certainty about it was that it would match the keys dangling in Laura's pocket. 

Beside the car, on a flat rock unburdened by snow and brightened by the reflected blues and greens of the inn’s neon sign, they found a vending machine.

Laura approached it in a careful half-circle.

“Says here,  _ Georgia Coffee _ ,” she reported back. “It’s all cans. Wow, you can get it cold or hot? Neat.”

“I don't think we can assume we are in Georgia.”

“Say, you didn't answer earlier: do you think the coffee caused that? The rescue?” Laura dug into her pocket for some spare change. 

“I'll be honest with you, Laura: I don't much know what to think anymore.” Faster on the draw, Dale paid up and bought her a hot latte. “But wouldn't it be beautiful if it did…”

She bowed and got him the blackest can she could see. “If you're a coffee fetishist, then yes, Dale, it would.” 

She wrapped her hands around her coffee, thankful for the warmth, and smirked, because underneath it all, actually, yes, it would be nice if life were allowed to be that stupidly simple and good sometimes.

 

Leaning against the parking lot’s fence, they cheered and took their first sip.

At the very least, it tasted good: rich brew, and a pretty incredible taste, all things considered.

 

(They didn't have canned brands back then, but that didn't stop kids in Twin Peaks from pouring a pot of fresh coffee into a bottle to carry along in their adventures out in the woods. There was one day in winter, they must have been so tiny, Laura remembered from Donna's smiles that she was still wearing braces, and her hair was tied back in a perfect little ponytail. They had snuck out and made their way back to a spot along the river where Will had taken them fishing, so that it could be just them sitting on that big fallen fir, no boring dads with their boring dad sports. Claiming it as their secret palace, they sat there and talked, talked like they did when they were still close, talked like the surface of the river and the swift deeper currents underneath, for as long as they had coffee to keep them warm… the memory of that day had never left her. She hoped that Donna remembered it too, wherever she was, in the land of the living.)

 

With her eyes closed and the hot coffee on her tongue, Laura stretched her arm and found Donna's hand under hers, older now, rougher and marked by the first wrinkles, just like hers. It wasn't the same spot or even the same trees, maple bows above their heads and a soft scent of black cherry trees like she'd never seen back in their Washington woods. But there was a fallen log (aspen? Beech? If she couldn't eat it she wasn't all that interested in the technicalities), there was a river, and there was her Donna sitting and sipping coffee on a cold morning, and Laura remembered what home felt like. Will was there too, now frail with age, but time had touched Donna most of all, wearing her down to a deep-set steely frown and unnaturally swollen skin. Laura would not fault her for walking through fire and coming out scathed. Donna did not fault her for being far away. In that moment, on that log, they could be muffins sharing a thermos of coffee, Donna and Laura, Laura and Donna and Will and nothing else, having a taste of a life that never tore them apart. She drank with them by the stream, laughed as Donna pointed out all the trouts that were refusing to pay attention to Will's noble efforts to get them lunch, and cried like you cry on those rare perfect days, feeling their radiance and their weight on your weary bones.

  
At some point it was dawn in the parking lot, her can having long gone cold and empty, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. Dale was staring at the road ahead, shivering, muttering apologies under his breath to someone Laura didn't know, someone he had met again sitting by his side on his fallen log, as they shared a can of coffee by his stream, in his forest, or whatever it is that city boys carry with them as their dearest memories: his way back, his fixed star. Laura didn't ask, nor did she share hers. She patted his back and they stayed there, arms wrapped on each other's shoulders until the time came to continue their journey. Maybe love would be enough.


End file.
